I finished reading American Cosmic and it was quite different from other books I've read on the topic. What I wrote below is kind of a rough selection of some points brought up in the book I thought worth sharing with others on here and sometimes commenting on.
The author says that synchronicities follow along naturally in this research, but they don't always have a significant meaning, and some people can be enamoured by them and lose perspective and objectivity. Even when Scott tries his best to curate quality UFO content, disinformation combined with technology is making the task next to impossible. I thought it was interesting how the author drew a connection between this and St Teresa of Avila's getting stabbed by an angel in a vision and going into religious ecstacy - very few historical counts relying on the primary sources of the "miracle" mention that very curious fact, and instead there are layers of christian hagiography and gloss plastered over it.
The author talks about how cinema attempts to mimic the feel of reality already compromises people's ability to differentiate reality from fiction on a subcortical level - people know something to be intellectually false but emotionally they can draw connections between fictional events and real life dynamics and interactions (the author cites Star Wars' evil empire and the political history as construed in the post-war era of the 20th century). From the perspective of religious studies, these have a great impact in shaping our cultural, "3D realities". Mass cultural programming through the mass media and its propagation of images surrounding the UFO phenomena causes it to quickly develop a life of its own, independent of the objective facts. It is easy to make the connection with religion here as well. I am reminded strongly of Pauline theology and the role of the Caesar passion plays had in the early days of Christianity. The story of Mark, perhaps as a play itself, would have had similar effects on the early Christian communities. The almost immediate attempt to co-opt and subvert with the book of Matthew I think lends a lot of credence to the author's thesis about how religious experiences get lensed through power interests before they become more widely promulgated, so the bits of truth that are there need to be carefully gleaned so that those fine sparks of truth do not get extinguished but can live on and add to the fire of historical knowledge, to get poetic.
On pg 140 the author talks about co-evolution of humans with technology, which I inferred as being primarily about cultural evolution. I am reminded of the book of Enoch and the Watchers, and how Cain's descendents were responsible for technology, weapons, the formation of cities, makeup even. Cain himself, in some interpretations of the Bible, is seen as the progenitor of writing itself (the mark of Cain) and the amplification of power it entails to visit vengeance upon subsequent generations geometrically. "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly [his descendents be avenged] seventy and sevenfold."
I thought this passage was interesting: "David Halperin, a scholar of the Merkabah, the Jewish mystical tradition that arises form the visionary aspects of Ezekiel's wheel, has written extensively about the UFO phenomenon." I'm not sure what to make of it but I thought it was worth sharing.
Since it can be very tempting the way some religious studies are handled to put things into the dualist context of mind or body, subjective or objective, I liked how the author quotes Jaques Valles saying
"the UFO pheonomenon is a direct challenge to this arbitrary dichotomy between physical reality and spiritual reality." It really seems like one of the chief illusions that keep us trapped in 3D is that delusion, and I use that term delusion in the bibical sense of spiritual forces acting in the world with the intent to deceive people. It is acknowledged that people often give very different accounts of the UFO phenomenon along dualistic lines. One account is more empirical, talking about UFO sightings, evidence of remains, video footage; these types of accounts are are typically shared with authorities which cover the phenomenon (e.g. the government). But Jacques Valles notes that that aspect of the phenomenon is different from what the public perceives in UFO and alien interaction movies. There, the aliens are a persistent and personal psychological reality. Sometimes they are the strangers, sometimes the monsters, sometimes the friends or allies, even the comedic relief in some situations.
The result of this split is that the very real psychological and spiritual aspects of the phenomenon are disregarded outright, causing the phenomenon to exist in a marginal, liminal state where some of the open-minded take to the empirical aspect of it but have to keep it to themselves out of fear of being marginalized and maligned with people who are too engrossed in the subjective/psychological aspect of the phenomenon and who lose their grip on objective reality as a consequence. The author cites George Hanson's work The Trickster and the Paranormal, which talks about how an absurd element is always present in the supernatural and paranormal phenomena, including that of UFOs. The author contrasted the more rational elements of Christianity like its universalism with the more absurdist practice of consuming the flesh of Jesus; the latter was likely one aspect that delayed Christianity's widespread adoption.
It's like if you took a 2D photograph and compressed into one dimension of coded information. The image ceases to exist in the same meaningful way that it does as a 2D image for us, since 1s and 0s do not really contain information people can use to see reality unless they can read machine code. If you take the truth and you try and compress it into that dichotomy that believes in the "view from nowhere" that proponents of dualism claim to have, what they are effectively doing is compressing reality into too few dimensions for the truth to exist in. In the 3 Body Problem series, there's a gruesome scene where a high-tech alien civilization uses what was called a "dimensional weapon" to flatten space-time into 2 dimensions in a given 3D space, causing 3D life to cease to exist there. That has been used to wipe out whole solar systems in the past. I think this attempt to destroy truth through these schizoidal theories has a similarly destructive power and kill count.
On page 174 the author talks about how technology changes the notion of time and space, for example with how the internet compresses space so that people can communicate and observe almost anything from anywhere on the globe. The author ties this into how advertising itself in that environment begins to take on the form of synchronicities, where what used to be a curious aspect of the UFO and paranormal phenomena begins to almost seem more normal and widespread through artificial means. I'm not sure what to make of that, other than the fact that "entities love tech" and that pod people are much easier to manipulate via changing the news-feed algorithms.
Jacques Valles and the author's anonymous source Tyler D contend that the phenomenon is technological and that humans are equipped with biological antenna to absorb information from supernatural or paranormal sources, included the forces behind the UFO phenomena. The author devotes a couple of pages to talking about Tyler's theories about how and why this is. The author uses her own metaphor that working on one's health and cleaning one's machine improves our "router" rather than our "RAM", meaning that it helps improve our antennae to better access where information is stored (the information field) than just trying to recall what is in our physical brains. This aligns with what the C's have said about memory, and that the body itself only contains faint traces of information itself, with the rest of it being "in the cloud".
Throughout the book several close encounters with UFOs and supernatural phenomena are recorded, some of which were seen by atheists and devout christians. Each person had a different perspective on what happened and what they had witnessed, but everyone walked away transformed in their own way. They would mysteriously forget to photograph the evidence, yet afterwards start receiving "downloads" of information. It really seems like if the phenomena itself thinks its purposes are not served by being photographed, it has means at its disposal to ensure that doesn't happen.
Towards the end of the book there was an interesting section where the author visits the Vatican library and observatory with Tyler D. They go there to study "levitation and aerial phenomena," and that led to stories of saints. One in particular was an interesting case: sister Maria of Agreda's episodes of bilocation. This was a woman in the 1600's who bilocated to Mexico and interacted with the locals there, long before anyone there had met Europeans. When missionaries arrived there, they talked about sister Mary and were eager to convert to Catholicism. Initially Maria's visions of being brought there by Angels and the like were seen as an embarassement and Maria did face persecution and book burnings. Eventually though her story got out and it caught fire when colonists realized the story itself was useful as propaganda to expand the Spanish Empire. I am reminded of what the C's said about Montezuma's visions of Cortes as Quetzalcoatl, and how a myth was created ahead of time to lay the foundations for Spanish conquest.
While the author keeps the tone very light, when I read between the lines about the dominance of media, and how technology would come to control our lives with far greater granularity than the most oppressive theocracies of the past, it's difficult not to lay this at the feet of forces which spur and promote the development of certain technologies through these "downloads" and other synchronicities.
There's so much to go into just with that last little sentence. As a reader, I want to know more about why she found this insight compelling, and how does she apply it to everything she learned so far regarding the "phenomenon" as she continuously refers to it. I kept feeling that she started with a thought and then left it (and me) hanging.
A part of me wonders if the author herself even consciously realizes the true terror of the situation, or if hints like this just kind of "slip" onto the page while she's typing. Alternatively, there could be a lot she's not saying because it may be outside her scope of professional conduct as a major in religious studies. In the interview she gave awhile back, she said she started off researching this topic as a skeptic, but after completing the book became an agnostic about the phenomenon. That seems like an extremely diplomatic answer. Reporting some of the things she does there... one really wonders.
Yeah - and was the secret location where Sister Maria bilocated in the 1600s?
cassiopaea.org
